My Favorite Midlife Crisis (16 page)

I hummed a noncommittal note.

“God, I hate this,” Marie said, smiling weakly. “I’ve been losing sleep over whether I should tell you, but it’s for the good of the practice and now that I’m leaving...”

Oh, shit. I really didn’t want to hear this. Then again, such knowledge might come in handy.

“And I figured I ought to mind my own business. But it’s gotten too obvious to ignore. And it’s during office hours. I mean, they can’t keep their hands to themselves. When they think no one’s looking, he’ll...you know...grab for her...you know, breast. And I caught her patting his...uhmm...backside. That kind of inappropriate behavior. Some of the staff are picking up on it. Gossiping. Which isn’t good for the practice. So I thought I ought to tell you. I mean, I’m more comfortable telling you than Dr. Potak, him being a man.”

Take this with a grain of salt
, I reminded myself. Marie disliked Bethany. All of the support personnel did. Not entirely unwarranted. Even after repeated warnings, Bethany treated them like indentured servants, snapping orders and expecting immediate heel-clicking attention.

“I’m not sure what you can do about Dr. Bernstein, his being a partner and all.” She left unsaid what I knew the staff thought, that Seymour was the village idiot, always chasing after very short skirts barely covering very young legs. He was incorrigible, but untouchable. Bethany, on the other hand, did not have tenure.

“This is a wonderful practice,” Marie said. “Please don’t let that woman destroy it.”

“You did the right thing by telling me. I’ll deal with it. You can leave us with a clear conscience.” I gave her a reassuring shoulder pat. Then I went out to spy on the enemy.

You didn’t have to be James Bond, believe me. When they passed in the corridor, they slithered against each other like lizards on a hot rock. Reviewing papers in Seymour’s office, they leaned hip to hip. They traded lascivious glances in the coffee room, and there was an excessive use of tongue on Bethany’s part as she licked Coffeemate from the rim of her mug.

Now that Marie had alerted me, the hanky-panky was obvious. You could smell the musk and feel the electricity when you were in the same room with them. Ugh.

Still, despite all the sexual current I caught passing between them, I had no solid evidence, no reason to call Bethany on the carpet and take her down a peg, no excuse to defang the young pup nipping at my heels. In surgery, I was absolutely focused, but around the office I watched every move the suspects made and in the exam rooms my more observant patients noticed something was off.

One of my favorites, Sondra Delgado, told me I looked under the weather.

“Jet lag. But you look fine,” I switched subjects. “You’ve lost three pounds. Your osteoporosis test came back with great numbers.”

“Yeah, I work my ass off for them.” Sondra had a zesty way with words. She taught poetry writing classes at the local community college. She also led aerobics workouts at the Unitarian church. She was a knockout at sixty-four, which gave me hope.

I’d scraped the cells I needed for her Pap test, but she was still in the stirrups when she said, “Look at my pubic hair.”

I lifted the drape.

“It’s white,” she said.

“So is the hair on your head.” I’d been seeing Sondra Delgado for twenty-five years and she’d been a silver-haired beauty in her thirties. One of those premature grayers with golden skin that lit up against the silver.

“But my pubic hair has always been black. I had a big black bush. Now look at me. It’s almost all white, what’s left of it.”

“Well, pubic hair does thin out and will eventually gray with aging.”

“I want to dye it. That’s my question. Can I dye it? You’re smiling. If you laugh, I swear to God I change doctors.”

“It’s not you,” I assured her. I was caught in the memory of seeing Kat in the nude for the first time. We shared a room in college and she was changing into her pajamas and there it was, a dark shock of kinky pubic hair, a black bramble that didn’t resemble anything I knew. I’m a naturally fair Scandinavian and I’d hunted down Annie Johansson in the showers for confirmation that a scant drift of pale hair is a perfectly acceptable variation on the theme.

Now here was Sondra Delgado smiling back at me, but with tears in her eyes. “You’ve got to think I’m so shallow to worry about this when you have patients with cancer.”

“Not at all,” I said. “If it’s important to you, it’s important to me. But I don’t think dyeing it is a good idea. The pubis is a delicate area and you could have an allergic reaction.”

“Damn. As you might have guessed, there’s a man involved. I haven’t slept with him yet, but I know it’s going to happen and I’d be so mortified for him to see me like this. Like an old lady.”

“Well, his pubic hair is probably gray also.”

“It’s different for a man.”

I thought but didn’t say,
you’re
telling
me
? “Why don’t you shave it? That’s what the
Playboy
centerfolds do. It’s supposed to be very sexy. I have to warn you, it may itch at first. But if you keep it shaved, you should be fine.”

Sondra sat up. “You...are...brilliant. No, I mean it. That’s an absolutely brilliant solution. That’s why I see a woman doctor. And not one of those thirty-year-old know-it-alls who hasn’t the foggiest idea of which end is up for someone my age. I knew I could bank on you, Dr. Berke.”

Yes, it was only pubic hair, but it gave me a burst of confidence to know that age counted for something in a practice with its own thirty-year-old know-it-all.

Wednesday, at our monthly financial update, Seymour and Bethany prudently seated themselves across from each other at the conference table. Fifteen minutes in, with Neil deep into a discussion of profit/loss variables, I noticed Seymour get this goofy, dreamy look on his face that I’d seen enough times to know had nothing to do with bookkeeping. Eyes front, I slid a manila folder from my lap to the floor, then ducked to retrieve it, and…eureka! Proof positive: Bethany had extended a single shapely leg and her unshod foot was gently massaging Seymour’s crotch into a giveaway bulge. I bobbed back up to send her a “we will have a talk, young lady” glare and watched her face turn the color of a mushroom.

Chapter 17

You’ve got to be kidding. She was giving him a toe job in the conference room?” Fleur laughed with such gusto, I feared she might pitch herself into the pyracantha bushes lining the path to Kat’s studio.

We’d pulled into Kat’s driveway simultaneously on Saturday morning, answering her summons to help her decide which of her weavings to select for an upcoming gallery show. Now Fleur and I trudged together up the hill to the glass-enclosed addition Ethan had built as a fiftieth-birthday gift to his wife.

“It’s not funny, Fleur. It’s a breach of professional behavior. It’s unconscionable.”

Fleur blotted her eyes with a tissue. “Yeah, well, maybe you need to lighten up. So they’re hot for each other. So they engage in a little foreplay sub rosa. It’s not as if they’re shtupping patients. They’re shtupping each other. And you told me Bethany’s a bitch and he’s a jerk. So it’s a perfect match.”

“That’s not the point. It was in the office.”

“Under the table.”

“Not always. Why are you defending them?”

“I’m not defending them. But do you really think it dishonors the entire medical profession for one of you to get caught with your foot on your boss’s dick in the conference room?” She broke herself up again.

Why did I even bother? Fleur, close as we are, could never understand why I was so outraged at this desecration. That’s what it seemed to me, anyway. Because I wasn’t Bethany McGowan whose family was one of those Eastern shore estate clans with money to send their daughter to private schools and on to Harvard, or Seymour Bernstein who’d followed his obstetrician father into the family business. Medicine had rescued me from my lousy beginnings. A crazy, abusive mother. An overwhelmed father who, until he got the job at Beth Steel when I was twelve, barely supported us on his janitor’s wages. I could count the books in the house on one hand. So medicine gave me a life and work that I love. I didn’t practice my father’s Lutheranism or my mother’s Catholicism, but I did practice medicine. And if occasionally I got the giggles in the Church of the Holy Speculum, I never defiled the premises.

Fleur was panting, but she managed to say, “All right, seriously, have you talked to them about it?”

“Not yet. I haven’t had the chance. Right after the meeting, Seymour left for Chicago for some course he’s taking. And Bethany very conveniently came down with the flu and hasn’t shown up for the last two days.”

“Well, they can’t duck you forever.”

“I can’t decide who’s more culpable. Bethany, who’s sleeping her way into a partnership, or Bernstein, who’s taking advantage of her ambition.”

“Bernstein. He’s the senior. He should know better.”

True, but it was the junior breathing down my neck, poised to kick my ass into the sunset with a foot that had been places I didn’t really want to think about. What I did enjoy contemplating, what I anticipated with wicked satisfaction, was the look on her face when I asked her to step into my office for a private talk about a very private matter.

My smirk gave way to a sigh when I contemplated the long list of things I should have been doing that Saturday morning instead of sorting through Kat’s tapestries. Laundry to catch up on after nearly a week away, a paper to finish for the October deadline of
Annals of Gynecology,
notes to organize for a talk I was giving in Philadelphia the following weekend, a haircut before my date with Harry that night, and I’d wanted to take my father to see Dan Rosetti, one of the last of a dying breed of docs who kept Saturday morning hours.

It wasn’t as if Kat really needed us. The two men who owned the Charles Street Gallery had selected the pieces—tapestries, rugs, shawls, and other wearables—for the exhibit, but she thought they picked the most saleable ones, which might not be her best work. Lee had made his choices. But since he was a sculptor with an eye biased for form, she wasn’t sure she entirely trusted his judgment either.

She must have been desperate to turn to Fleur and me for our opinion on, of all things, art. Fleur’s taste in art ran to thoroughbreds grazing in meadows, hunting scenes, and portraits of dead ancestors. I’d grown up in a house with fiber art—the Last Supper painted on velvet hanging over the couch. One of the perks of dating Stan had been borrowing his taste in everything, the way I bummed his cigarettes.

I’d told Kat that Fleur and I were the Laurel and Hardy of art connoisseurs, but she’d insisted she needed us. She was nervous about the exhibit. It was in a major Baltimore gallery. The
Washington Post
art critic had promised he’d be up for the opening.

When women call women for help, we drop everything and rush to the rescue. I’d flown to Kat’s side when her sister Melanie died of breast cancer a decade before, and left a full waiting room to hold her hand through her mother’s last hours. Fleur let Quincy run the store for three days during the punch-drunk week after Stan KO’d me with The Treachery. It’s the law of the coven. Sister down! Sisters rally!

As we approached Kat’s studio I thought again that Ethan Greenfield must have loved his wife extravagantly to have built her such a workplace. After his parents died, he sunk most of his moderate inheritance into his organic vegetable business, which was really a compost heap, turning dollars into fertilizer with amazing efficiency. But he’d set apart a chunk to pay for building this studio addition for Kat which, architecturally, was as crisply angled and clean lined as a Swedish church.

Inside was all earthbound practicality. The single room was huge, with picture windows and a skylight so the studio was flooded with natural light. Just beyond the door, a long trestle table held pots of dyes, foam brushes, and a table loom. Dead center, three floor looms sat, one dressed for Kat’s latest project. In preparation for the show, the candidate tapestries were displayed on the far wall.

Kat stood to one side of them, shoulders slumped. Her eyes were focused not on her work but on her daughter whose face was closed, emotionless, as if she’d pulled down every shutter and slammed every door. Kat’s face was readable: sadness and pain. It was obvious we’d walked in on a major moment.

“Hi, Kat,” Fleur said, but neither of us moved beyond the door where we’d stalled out when we saw Summer. Fleur didn’t like her any more than I did. “Hello, Summer. What a surprise! We didn’t know you’d be here, did we, Gwyn?”

“Summer is pregnant,” Kat announced. Flat out, no preamble, just “Summer is pregnant,” without joy.

“Well, isn’t that nice,” Fleur said as she flashed me a look. I knew she was thinking
Rosemary’s Baby.

I recalled being surprised midweek to see Summer emerge from an exam room and, spotting me, smile and lift her hand in greeting. Unusual, the smile and the wave. She must have just gotten the news.

“Yes, it’s very nice for Summer and Tim. But not so wonderful for me.” Kat dragged herself out of Summer’s direct beam. I saw the sadness drain from her eyes and something igneous replace it. She began to pace. “Summer has just given me an ultimatum. Haven’t you, Summer? It seems I have a choice to make. And if I make what Summer has decided is the wrong choice, I may never see my grandchild. Because I’m not going to be permitted—that was your word wasn’t it, Sum—or maybe it was allowed, I’m not going to be allowed to have any contact with my grandchild if I don’t meet Summer’s condition. And Summer’s condition is that I have to stop seeing Lee to see the baby. Isn’t that right, Summer? That’s it in a nutshell, isn’t it?”